the big debate of artificial sweeteners havenever been as big as it is today. artificial sweeteners have been deemed dangerous foryour health after heavy fear-mongering and links to problems ranging from headaches tocancer. and the one artificial sweetener that has taken the most assault is aspartame.the people that have already heard of aspartame generally have a bad opinion of aspartame.for those of you that never heard of it, well if you ever drank a diet soda, you most certainlyhave consumed aspartame as well. so what exactly is so wrong with it?let's look at what happens to aspartame within the body. aspartame is broken down to phenylalanine,aspartic acid, and methanol. outside of people with a rare genetic disorder known as phenylketonuria,phenylalanine and aspartic acid are generally
safe to consume, since they're amino acidsthat exist in pretty much any protein source. but the big bad wolf of these three is methanol.methanol can definitely be toxic for your body in very high amounts because your bodyconverts methanol into a proven dangerous compound known as formaldehyde. many anti-aspartamefolks will tell you to avoid aspartame exactly for this reason. but the studies unfortunatelydoesn't back it up. reason being is because the amount of methanol from aspartame consumption,is, well, extremely small. and at such small doses, the added methanol into the body simplydoesn't do anything to the body. in fact, your body produces formaldehyde every singleday in amounts thousands of times greater than you can get from aspartame. it's justsimply not enough. and on top of that, one
study has subjects consuming upwards 200 milligramsof aspartame per kilogram of bodyweight, which is 40 times greater than the average americandaily consumption. yet, still nothing. no methanol poisoning nor changes in formaldehydelevels in the body. as far as causing cancer, well, the americancancer society themselves have looked at studies containing as much 500,000 adults and foundthat there's simply no strong link between cancer and aspartame.another cause for concern is causing weight gain. people drink diet sodas so they canlose weight, but wouldn't it be pretty darn... crappy if that same diet soda actually makethem gain weight? well, good thing is that it doesn't. no causative studies has evershown artificial sweeteners causing weight
gain. one 6-month long study even showed thatsubstituting regulars soda with diet soda is as effective as substituting with waterin terms of losing weight. and in case you're wondering, aspartame does not spike insulinlevels in healthy individuals as well as diabetics. but... you've probably seen people that drinkdiet soda and notice they're... pretty big. well, the real problem might be that theyjust under-estimate how many calories they're consuming. by drinking diet soda, they thinkthe zero calories means they can eat more, and chances are they do and eat way too muchmore. this explains the so-called "link" between obesity and diet soda when in fact it's notthe diet soda causing the weight gain, but more so bad eating habits associated withthe people that do drink diet soda. so it's
the person's habits that link to obesity andnot the diet soda. in terms of headaches, the studies are quiteinconclusive. trying to link headaches to anything is already a challenge, since manytimes even a placebo can have high returns in headache correlations. headache studieson aspartame share very similar correlations as a placebo, so it's hard to say for sure,and you're best just using your own judgment in this matter.so the studies are there, and it's clear that the fear of artificial sweeteners, especiallyaspartame, just doesn't hold up. the only concern that you can definitely have for dietsodas is that, just like regular soda, it's gonna rot your teeth.thank you once again for all the awesome patreon
supporters. the support has been very helpfulin keeping picturefit afloat and if you want to support as well, come check out patreon.com/picturefitand see if you help out. thanks for watching and please like and subscribe.
No comments:
Post a Comment